The present invention, in some embodiments thereof, relates to a method and apparatus for wastewater treatment, and, more particularly, but not exclusively, to such a method and apparatus for treatment of industrial waste water containing high levels of organic pollutants and salts.
Industrial wastewater treatment has used various technologies over the years.
The vast majority of treatment plants are based on biological processes, aerobic or an-aerobic or a combination of the two, and this is generally sufficient for domestic waste.
Recently MBR, membrane biological reactors, have entered the market, combining ultra-fine filtration with biological activity.
When dealing with wastewater containing high concentrations of organic matter or wastewater containing more than 3% salts, levels typical of industrial waste, then biological processes are not effective enough and other technologies have to be considered.
Such technologies include low and high pressure oxidation, super critical water oxidation etc.
Such technologies come under the heading of advanced oxidation processes AOP.
The common factor in all these advanced technologies is the need for energy input which renders the processes expensive and in most cases even prohibitively so.
In the events of wastewater containing both high concentrations of organics and salt, two difficult problems have to be solved.
The first is the destruction of the organics in the wastewater, and the second is the separation of salts from the water or distillation, to produce water that contains no harmful or hazardous organics and no salts, so the water can be reused or discharged safely to the environment. The present application addresses ways to carry out AOP, that is both to separate out the salts and to destroy the organic compounds, without incurring an excessive energy cost, either in environmental or economic terms.